Epistemic politics drove colonial archival production when race categories conflicted.

Evidence

If the pauperism commissions provide sites where shared understandings were justified and rehearsed, the discrepant assessments of what counted as European impoverishment in a specifically colonial context pulled at the seams of common sense in unintended ways. It did more than reveal the flimsy fabric of racial categories. It exposed a centralized colonial state whose departments and divisions were not in touch. It called to discussion the intricate stitching and sloppy patchwork of educational policy, residence laws, pension stipulations, and labor ordinances that contradicted one another as they differently defined what rules would hold for a colonial underclass neither fully of the rulers nor wholly of the ruled. If destitution of Europeans and their mixed descendants was the problem, what mattered to the “solutions” was how those who decided policy (and those who carried it out) imagined they could and should know race. Racial epistemologies were at issue. Epistemic politics and its practical consequences pushed the accumulation of paper. It was the political effects of how race should be assessed that had to be sorted out first. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 825

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains ‘epistemic politics’ as the notion that how officials imagine they can know race shapes policy and paperwork.
• XREF: Connects to concepts of race as an epistemic category rather than biological fact, echoing work by Ann Stoler and similar colonial-studies theorists on archival common sense.